Destigree

Inspiration

As high school students, the worry about where to go for post-secondary studies or just what to do in general is not only daunting, but also life changing. This decision that we have to make places a toll on many current students' lives, especially in terms of their overall mental-wellbeing. We want to help make that process easier. We want to help provide clarity to those who are unsure, ensuring that they know that they're not alone on this journey.

What it does

Destigree is a web application that asks the user to input what they like or aspects that are important to them in terms of their school life, more specifically, their hobbies, interests, requirements for schools, high school courses and grades. It is formatted in the form of playing cards, so when the user inputs the relevant information, the web application will process that data and output 8 cards that display different university degrees that are tailored to the response the user has given. The cards will display the degree, the reason why this degree may be suitable, the high school requirements for it, the top 3 universities that offer that specific degree, different careers you can pursue after university with it, and the average salary you can earn from that degree.

How we built it

This web application was built by creating a frontend and a backend. The front end was built by first creating a rough draft of a design of the front page. We worked on the search bar and got it to display some placeholders, then proceeded to work on smaller details before finally hooking it up to the backend. The backend is a Python-based web API built with FastAPI that uses AI (through Groq’s LLM service) to generate different university degree options. It consists of a FastAPI application (main.py) that lets users access HTTP endpoints, middleware for CORS so the frontend can safely interact with the backend, and an AI client configured with a secure API key loaded from environment variables using python-dotenv.

Challenges we ran into

A big challenge was making sure both the frontend data and the backend data matched and were connected, since there were many times the frontend worked, but the backend didn't, and vice versa. So, figuring out how to establish a secure connection between the two, and making sure all the data matched correctly was a challenge that we overcame at the end of the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of completing our website in 24 hours, and for learning new programming languages during this hackathon. We're happy about the fact that we executed an idea that was meaningful to us, and something that positively impacts high school students' lives for the better.

What we learned

This is our first hackathon, and this is the first time our team is making a whole website from scratch. The biggest lesson we learnt during this hackathon was how to split the work evenly and how to contribute, whether it be big or small, to make the overall project a success. Learning coding languages, such as HTML and CSS for the frontend, during these 24 hours was something new and something we'll definitely be making use of in the future.

What's next for Destigree

We want to hopefully go the next step and instead of just displaying information for the user to see and read, they can instead talk to someone, whether a one-to-one call or by talking to an AI chatbot, so that they can find out more information about what degrees they could potentially pursue and get real-time advice, rather than just read information and digest it.